ActionPack - for Executives

Problem Overview

It's easy to get bogged down in the thought that altruism in the corporate world rarely pays dividends. It's hard to create a business from users who are freely able to download their data from your site and take them elsewhere if they choose. The if-you-love-someone-set-him-free mentality may work for Sting, but conventional business wisdom points to the opposite being true: if you love your users lock them in. How -- in a climate where it's about the data, stupid -- can data portablity in fact help you grow an audience, increase revenues and stay competitive?

Problem Specifics

Portable data is usable data. This problem has been at the heart of IT debates for 30 years. Businesses create systems where data is locked in silos. Those silos are then inaccessible to the users outside of those silos who could put the data to good use. Silos are walls built (usually purposefully) to keep the data clean and safe. Because these walls exist, the process of gaining access to data is arduous, the process for syncing data between silos is risky, and the process for normailizing (or creating apples-to-apples comparisons between data in two separate silos) data between silos is a wish rarely granted. But that's putting the cart before the horse. What you need is a business case for breaking down the walls in the first place. What would you do with your data if it weren't locked in silos? You'd boil the ocean. If your data isn't locked away behind a firewall - if instead it's accessbile by easy-to-use and reliable API's - then you could do anything you wanted to with that data. Which is exactly what you wanted to do in the first place. Because after all, isn't that why you created the data in the first place? To have it available to you anytime, anywhere?

More to come...

Need to cite more ways of using data - cross-platform, for example.

Need to cite P2P models of selfishness (and how selfishness begets sharing, oddly enough) and difference between publishing and authoring data (and how they are not the same).

Need to cite use cases for redundancy, efficiency in TCP/IP and Usenet models of data sharing.

Need to cite signalling model for confidence-assurance

Need to cite reputation model contributing to brand strenght

Need to cite economic reciprocity models and capitalizing on them

Finally, need to cite platform-creation and standardization which offer clearest methods for adding value to data in the long-run

Actions you can take

Community Evangelism

TBD. List communities of interest for this audience that would welcome input and support from DataPortability advocates.

Open Initiatives

List open source projects that could benefit from input from this audience

Implement DataPortability

A list of resources that make it possible for this [audience] to implement DataPortability into your next product or consultancy programme.

Business Justification Guides

Design/Decision Guides

Reference Implementations

Case Studies

List of places you can promote your outcomes/register your compatibility